Between the River and the Railroad Tracks

On Sale: Nov 17, 2026
Page Count: 320 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
ISBN-13: 9780316564335

$14.99

$19.99 CAD

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Meticulously crafted and unflinchingly vulnerable, MacArthur Fellow Nicole R. Fleetwood's Between the River and the Railroad Tracks is an untold story of the black Midwest and a testament to black hope and love in the face of a nation’s insatiable racism.

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Nicole R. Fleetwood is the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication in the Steinhardt School at New York University. A MacArthur Fellow, she is a writer, curator, and art critic whose interests are contemporary Black diasporic art and visual culture, gender and feminist studies, creative nonfiction, prison abolition and carceral studies, and poverty studies. She is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination, and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness.

Praise for Marking Time:
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
A Smithsonian Book of the Year
A New York Review of Books “Best of 2020” Selection
“Profoundly revisionist.”
National Book Critics Circle
“[An] absorbing book…Fleetwood seeks to revise the mainstream media narrative.”
New York Times Book Review
“Elucidating the cultural and aesthetic significance of visual art created by incarcerated people.”
MacArthur Foundation
“[Fleetwood] brings together an impressive array of paintings, sculptures, murals, and photos that speak to the impact of incarceration on American life…In amplifying the stories of those marked by incarceration, she makes visible the individuals and families the carceral state has tried so hard to disappear and silence.”
Los Angeles Review of Books
“[An] ambitious book…Fleetwood deftly weaves personal narrative together with nuanced readings of artworks created by incarcerated people…She models how creative expression can build the coalitions necessary for imagining and realizing a more just society.”
Smithsonian
“An urgently political text…Fleetwood’s analysis follows a narrative arc that moves across artistic mediums and within the physical architecture of prison itself…Marking Time moves fluidly between this art historical survey and a sharp attention to the social apparatuses that have enabled the very foundation of the prison state.”
The Nation
“Marking Time is a tremendous achievement… It is the kind of book that stays with you long after you finish, inspiring change in us all.”
Elizabeth Hinton, author of America on Fire

Nicole R. Fleetwood

About the Author

Nicole R. Fleetwood is the inaugural James Weldon Johnson Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication in the Steinhardt School at New York University. A MacArthur Fellow, she is a writer, curator, and art critic whose interests are contemporary Black diasporic art and visual culture, gender and feminist studies, creative nonfiction, prison abolition and carceral studies, and poverty studies. She is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination, and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness.

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